On Tuesday, November 18, 2003, at 05:23 AM, David Beroff wrote:
Agreed, but your very own examples demonstrate the problem. ... This one has potentially two different "pivots":
123 456.789, 14159 265
Right, that's a problem, one that I missed at 4:00 AM.
It is possible to refine the rule to recognize your example as an error by distinguishing the "strong" separators period and comma from the "weak" separators space, underscore, and accent (George's suggestion).
But none of that matters because one is still faced with the fundamental question of how to interpret these simple entries:
123,456
123.456
I think it is clear that if those numbers are entered as amounts of grams, dollars, or euros they should be interpreted as (123 + 456 / 1000). It would be idiotic to assume the user intends to spend 123456 of those things.
I guess if you want to spend some absurdly high amount of something like Turkish lira one could allow space as a separator:
123 456,78
E-gold could adopt the simple rule that they will allow either a single period or comma in a number to serve as a fractional pivot, and any other characters in the entry must be either digits or spaces. That's it.
This sensible rule is in harmony with the ISO 31-0:1992 standard that John Kenrick noted on this list, and with the standard that David Hillary learned in school.
-- Patrick http://fexl.com
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